How Do I Display My Contacts in Gmail?
Gmail contacts can be a little confusing, especially if you realize that the popular email service automatically dumps everyone you chat with on the Internet into a large ” Other Contacts ” directory. This makes it easier to auto-complete emails for people that Gmail thinks you might interact again at some point in the future, but it can also cause a bit of confusion when unexpected names or email addresses appear in the To: field.
And that’s not all.
Lifehacker reader Bob writes:
“David, some of my contacts, when placed in ‘To:’ in Google Mail, add an email address after the name, like [example name (email@company.com)]. This does not happen with all Gmail contacts, but only with a few. I would like to edit them so that it doesn’t add the email address after the name. How should I do it?
Thanks to you Bob, I’ve spent the last hour or so sitting in Gmail and Google Contacts, trying all sorts of tricks to get a little more control over what appears in the “To:” field in your email. However, this time was well spent as I think I have a few ideas that might help you.
In an ideal world, it would be great if there was some kind of setting in Gmail that you could tweak to specify how names and email addresses should always appear when composing a new message – be it a simple first and last name, the alias you’ve provided the recipient’s email address, etc. (And it would also be great if there was a way to separate, say, the nickname you gave a contact from what they see when they receive your email.)
Otherwise, it might seem like Gmail picks whatever it wants when auto-filling the email address in the “To:” field of a new message: sometimes it’s the contact’s first and last name, sometimes the first name has an email appended to the end of this, sometimes just the domain the recipient is appended to the end of their name, and so on.
I found that discrepancies are always related to some kind of data in your Google contacts . For example, if you’ve ever emailed only one person from one email address and they don’t share their name with anyone else, then chances are good that when you enter their name or email address, only their name will be automatically added to the field. messages “To:”. (This is, of course, provided that Gmail can parse the person’s first and last name correctly, and then put that in your Other Contacts list.)
If the recipient has multiple email addresses — for example, if you’ve shared correspondence between their work and personal accounts — you’ll likely see the domain or their full email address instead of their name.
To “fix” this functionality as it should, look at your contacts — regular and “others” and remove any links to the person’s other email addresses. If this is not a problem for you, and you only want to correspond with this person through one of their email addresses, this ensures that you will always see only his name and only his name when Gmail automatically fills in the “To:” field.
There is another fun trick you can try too. If you don’t like the fact that you always see a person’s name and not their email address, you can always delete their name in Google Contacts and just make their name your email address. You will no longer be able to search for them by name when you add them to the “To:” field of a message, but at least you will see their email. (Otherwise, you can always just double-click the recipient’s name in the To: field to temporarily display their email address.)